Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: People's fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
Here's the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that clearly marks future time—so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I'm writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). But other languages, like Mandarin, don't require that their verbs be escorted by grammatical markers that convey future time—time is usually obvious from something else in the context. In Mandarin, you would say the equivalent of I write tomorrow, using the same verb form for both present and future.
To see how economists are broadening their method: LanguageBrokeFat
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